


Anamnesis

by roeycleine (2pork)



Category: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - Stoppard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-19
Updated: 2009-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-04 16:18:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2pork/pseuds/roeycleine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At one point, Guildenstern discovers love, and it did him no good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anamnesis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Iambic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iambic/gifts).



At one point, Guildenstern discovers love, and it did him no good.

  
-  


He stands there, hands behind his back, a solemn frown set on his face despite the grimace trying to break through. He’s aware of Rosencrantz standing beside him, frightened and whimpering and fidgeting. Even more now. He feels as if it’s his own wrists being rubbed raw against the rope, as if it’s his own hands fighting to make the sign of the cross – in vain. The bonds are tight. The boards under their feet creak with every movement, counting down until their very last second.

He closes his eyes.

“Guildenstern?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Guil… Rosencrantz? _Guildenstern_?”

Guildenstern peers at his friend tiredly.

“I suppose…” Rosencrantz bites his lower lip. He quivers, says, “I think I may be scared… just a little. It’s my first time dying, you know? Or… well, if I believed in reincarnation, then maybe it isn’t, but I don’t… not really, no – _Guildenstern_, I think. No, I, yes, I’m very, very scared. _I don’t want to die_.”

Comfort him, his instinct says. Say something. Do something. Ropes are just ropes.

The wood underneath them gives way.

What Guildenstern feels then is, he thinks, something more than wind, rushing through his mind and blocking any other noise.

  
-  


_To tell you the truth, I’m relieved._

  
-  


He falls off the bed the very moment someone bangs on the shutters. He hears his friend groan from across the room and looks at him. The tangled strands of hair, the dust that settled over his clothes, the soft, unadulterated air he bears even in his sleep.

He is given a moment to think about what will happen if he walks over there and strokes back the clump of hair covering Rosencrantz’s face before the banging starts again.

“**Rosencrantz! Guildenstern!**”

  
-  


_We were sent for._

  
-  


“Don’t move,” an old man tells them from his seat on top of the cart. His voice rumbles over them, keeps them on their saddles, as the men bustled with their baskets and boxes and crates and coloured fabrics. The cart opens into a stage and the man comes down with an introduction. He is cheery and engaging and everything needed to sell to an audience, and they are the only audience present. “We’ve played to bigger, of course, but _quality_ counts for something.”

Guildenstern can only raise his brows at the Tragedians’ display, although distracted once at the fascinated sound Rosencrantz utters when the rapier is stuck through a man.

“Faithless wives and ravished virgins,” the Player says as the skirt is ripped off Alfred. “_Flagrante delicto_ at a price for which there are special terms. It costs little to watch and… little more to get caught up in the action, if that’s your taste and times being what they are.”

“What are they?” Guildenstern asks.

“Indifferent.”

Rosencrantz cuts in, uncertain. “Bad?”

“Wicked.” And he continues, “See anything you like? A lucky thing we came along.”

Guildenstern remains silent as Rosencrantz is entertained. He grinds his teeth, annoyed at his friend’s obliviousness to the patronizing tone, and speaks up, “It was luck, then.”

“Or fate.”

“Yours or ours?”

The Player leans closer, his stale breath puffing at Guildenstern’s face. “It could hardly be one without the other.”

  
-  


_I want to go home._

  
-  


“We’d better find him then,” Rosencrantz suggests, the toe of his boot scuffing against an uneven part of the floor. “Do something… ah.”

Guildenstern turns towards him. “What is it?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“Right.” He snorts and begins walking once more.

Rosencrantz checks him for a few seconds before hurriedly bending down to pick up a feather. He blows at it, bringing up a hand to dust it off, and puts it in his pocket. “So what’ll we do?”

“You want to find him, though we might all of us be going around in circles looking for each other… if Hamlet even knows we are here.”

“The king must’ve told him.”

“And tell him _what_ exactly?” Guildenstern stops and swings around again. “My dear nephew, I have invited your good friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – good luck telling them apart, by the way, though I suppose you’d have better luck since you’ve known them longer – to Elsinore in order to glean your affliction. Is that what he should have said?”

Rosencrantz stares back at him, wide-eyed. “Not so… not as such… Sorry,” he says sheepishly, bowing his head, and immediately Guildenstern feels bad.

“No, I’m sorry don’t – just… try to understand all right?” His frown is not erased until the moment they see Hamlet. He kept it back, biting the inside of his cheek, and even harder through Rosencrantz’s greeting of, “_My most dear Lord_.”

  
-  


_What have we got to go on?_

  
-  


My Lord, you stare a little too long, he wants to say. Rosencrantz is no help, staring back at the prince shamelessly, and Guildenstern – wants to throttle them both, if he is to be honest. If honesty in this situation is wise, but he knows it is not, and so he withholds.

Hamlet climbs up the dinner table, reciting a verse neither of them can react to. Discouraged and pathetic, he kneels and says, “I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises.”

Guildenstern grips the arm of the chair tight as he watches the prince crawl towards Rosencrantz’s end of the table. _Too close_.

Hamlet reaches Rosencrantz, who looks at Guildenstern, hand poised beside his goblet, protecting it, and his eyes begging, pleading for an answer to _what am I supposed to do?_ But the prince remains there only for a breath, before climbing down and moving back to his seat. He goes on, still standing. “And indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you,” he gestures upwards, and the other two look up at the chandelier and the ceiling, “this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire – why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

There is a pause.

“Man delights not me,” Hamlet says finally.

Guildenstern is torn between relief and disbelief.

  
-  


_He murdered us._

  
-  


“Do you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?”

He paces closer. “No.”

“Nor do I really,” Rosencrantz agrees. “It’s silly to be depressed by it.”

“Then don’t be,” he mumbles.

Rosencrantz pushes himself up to his elbows and looks at him with curiosity. “What was that?”

“What was what?”

“I thought you said some… Hm. Must be my imagination.” He lies back down. “… One thinks of it as being _alive_ in a box, and keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference… shouldn’t it? I mean, you’d never _know_ you were in a box, would you? It would be just like you were asleep in a box. Not that I’d like to sleep in a box, mind you, not without any air. You’d wake up dead for a start, and then where would you be? In a box.”

Guildenstern settles for leaning beside Rosencrantz, elbow propped on the table, hand supporting his chin, eyes watching his friend intently. That moment, he doesn’t point out to Rosencrantz that one doesn’t wake up at all should one be dead.

  
-  


_I’m not going to stand for it!_

  
-  


He says something unkind again and sits next to Rosencrantz, heart beating too fast and too loud. He holds his friend closer, all the while wanting to kick himself, and he tells him _it’s all right_. He’ll make sure they’ll be all right. Heaven knows how he’ll do it, because heaven knows he himself doesn’t know what to do.

  
-  


_I suppose we just go on._

  
-  


“That on the knowing of this contents, without delay of any kind,” the Player reads from the letter Guildenstern presented him, “should the bearers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, put to sudden death.” The Player raises his eyes towards them slowly.

“Not that letter,” Rosencrantz quickly disclaims.

Guildenstern quietly announces the presence of another letter, but of course there isn’t. Hamlet is obviously the cause and now he’s gone, and… Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sailing to their death.

  
-  


_That’s it, then, is it?_

  
-  


Guildenstern looks down for a moment and finds a rock by Rosencrantz’s foot.

“They sure don’t clean up well, do they?”

“No,” he answers. “What’s that hanging out of your pocket?”

“Oh, a… ah, it’s a feather,” Rosencrantz says, too brightly for someone with a rope loosely looped around his neck. “I must’ve picked it up some time ago… or suppose it was in my pocket before I knew of it… either way, it’s pretty useless.”

“You’re right.”

Rosencrantz shifts and the feather flits down on top of the rock.

Guildenstern observes it for a moment – and decides that he’s had enough of stalling. He clears his throat and turns his gaze to his Rosencrantz for quite possibly the last time. “Rosencrantz,” he calls softly.

“Yes?”

He pauses. “No, nothing.”

The floorboards creak, and the restraints are suddenly too tight.

“Ro – Guildenstern?”

“Yes?”

“I… I’m not very sure I want to… I don’t want to die.”

  
-  


_I’ve had enough._

  
-  


They drop.

What Guildenstern feels then is something more than wind rushing past him. He feels everything running through and out his mind, and for a moment he thinks, _my memories_… and he forgets.


End file.
